Katharine Hepburn

Actress

  • Born: May 12, 1907
  • Birthplace: Hartford, Connecticut
  • Died: June 29, 2003
  • Place of death: Old Saybrook, Connecticut

American actor

With a career spanning most of the twentieth century, Hepburn embodied wit, independence, and charm. She was one of the first actors to break down Hollywood’s stereotype of women, facing not only a shocked public but also condemnation from film critics. Nevertheless, she was a model of grit and beauty throughout her career.

Areas of achievement Film, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Katharine Hepburn was born the second of six children of Katharine “Kit” Hepburn and Thomas Hepburn. Her mother was part of a well-known New England family, the Houghtons. Encouraged by her dying mother to acquire an education for herself and her sisters, Kit eventually earned a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr (1899) and a master’s degree from Radcliffe (1900). Houghton’s upbringing encouraged her to value independence, education, and social responsibility, three qualities that dominated her life. Because of her mother’s interests, Hepburn had a childhood that was characterized by her family’s deep involvement in many social causes of the day: the suffrage movement, the presence of brothels in their home city of Hartford and the associated spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and the efforts to provide safe birth control to women. The latter cause was led by Margaret Sanger, a friend of the Hepburns.

The Hepburn family’s social conscience was not, however, guided solely by Kit. Thomas Hepburn was a young medical student when he first met Kit, and his sense of social awareness was as acute as hers. He chose to specialize in urology, an unmentionable subject in the polite society of that time. His practice led him to understand the horrors of syphilis, which was devastating the populations of all social classes. He chose to speak out about this taboo disease, at one point even paying for the printing and distribution of a play (Damaged Goods, by French dramatist Eugène Brieux) on the subject.

Another feature of Hepburn’s childhood was her family’s emphasis on physical activity. From ice-cold baths to swinging on a homemade trapeze strung from the trees to playing tennis and golf, the family’s active life was the result in large part of Thomas’s belief that a sluggish body led to a sluggish mind.

This closely knit family did suffer one early tragedy that also shaped Hepburn’s growth: the accidental death by hanging of the oldest child, Tom, who was especially close to his sister Katharine. (For some seventy years afterward, she used Tom’s birthday as her own, not revealing her true birthday until she published her autobiography in 1991.) Soon after her brother’s death, Hepburn and her four siblings formed the Hepburn Players, an assortment of neighborhood children who put on performances with their own staging and direction. Even here, the family’s social consciousness dominated: All proceeds from their production of Beauty and the Beast went to benefit the children of the Navajo Indians in New Mexico. Hepburn played the beast.

Like her mother and grandmother before her, Hepburn attended Bryn Mawr, where she took part in many of the school theatricals. Her parts ranged from playing a young man in one performance to playing Pandora in The Woman in the Moone. These experiences seem to have led to her decision to become an actor; just before the end of her senior year, she approached Edwin H. Knopf, a director of a local theater company, armed with a letter of introduction and asking for work. She graduated from Bryn Mawr with a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy in 1928. The same year she married Ludlow Ogden Smith, a businessman. Although they divorced in 1934, they remained lifelong friends.

Life’s Work

In 1928, just before her graduation from Bryn Mawr, Hepburn’s persistence overrode Knopf’s objections, and he hired her to play one of six ladies-in-waiting in a production of The Czarina (1928). Hepburn’s early years on the stage were marked by many struggles and ups and downs. She was, as she later said, “a quick study”: She could read a part wonderfully and impress the director. When she was hired, however, she lacked the training and experience to carry through a full performance.

In 1932, Hepburn played the supporting role of Antiope, an Amazon warrior, in the Broadway production of The Warrior’s Husband. Her entrance staggered Broadway: Wearing a short tunic, a helmet, a breastplate, and leggings, and carrying a dead stag over her shoulder, Hepburn leapt down a steep ramp and onto a platform, where she hurled the stag at Hippolyta’s feet. Her stature enhanced the effect: At five feet seven inches, she was tall for actresses of the era. The performance led to an offer of a screen test for Hepburn.

On the basis of this screen test, Hepburn was awarded her first role in Hollywood, playing Hillary Fairfield in the 1932 film A Bill of Divorcement with the famous John Barrymore. This role led to her instant fame, although her second film in Hollywood, Christopher Strong, was neither a popular nor a critical success. Hepburn’s popularity returned after her third picture, Morning Glory (1933), for which she was awarded her first Academy Award for Best Actress. Hepburn’s next film role, Jo in Little Women (1933), was critically acclaimed, but she was not to be part of another popular film until Stage Door in 1937.

After she received her Academy Award, Hepburn’s appeal was so great that she was offered the lead in the stage production of The Lake (1934). The play began disastrously, with a hard director apparently trying to browbeat Hepburn into buying out her contract. In her famous review of the play, critic Dorothy Parker gibed that Hepburn had “run the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Hepburn stuck to her work, however, and struggled so hard to improve each performance that, by the time the play closed, she was turning in excellent performances. Soon after this experience, Hepburn returned to Hollywood.

In 1938, Hepburn’s second film with the talented Cary Grant, Bringing up Baby, was released. Though it was not enormously popular upon first release, Bringing up Baby later came to be considered the finest of the “screwball comedies” that were so popular during the 1920’s and 1930’s. In the meantime, her fiery outspokenness, cutting wit, and unconventional life soured many filmgoers of the times. Like her parents she was a firm liberal, and she was a feminist, advocating then socially unacceptable issues such as birth control. Moreover, her relation with the press was often hostile. Once, asked whether she and her husband had any children, she shot back, “Yes, two white and three colored.” In her role in the unsuccessful Sylvia Scarlet she dressed as a boy during the majority of scenes, which made audiences uncomfortable. In 1938 she was voted “box office poison” in a film industry poll.

Hepburn persevered nevertheless and enjoyed success in dealing with Hollywood on her own terms, and despite her previous difficulty with The Lake, often returned to the stage. One of her most successful theatrical runs was in The Philadelphia Story (1939). As well as starring in the play, Hepburn was involved in all aspects of its production, from writing to casting to arranging financing. She was as deeply involved in the writing and production of the film version of The Philadelphia Story (1940), in which she repeated her role from the stage version. It did much to erase her reputation as “box office poison.”

Another Hepburn film, Woman of the Year, was released in 1942. This picture marked Hepburn’s first screen work with the superb actor Spencer Tracy, and it initiated what became the longest screen partnership in history as well as a legendary Hollywood romance. They went on to make nine films together, including such comedy classics as Adam’s Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), and Desk Set (1957). As critics have noted, most of the plots were variations on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, pitting a sharp-tongued woman against a determined, often exasperated, but loving man. Hepburn and Tracy worked together until 1967, when their ninth and last film together, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, was completed shortly before Tracy’s death. Hepburn’s work in this film earned for her a second Academy Award, which she believed must have been meant for both Tracy and herself.

The African Queen (1951), made with Humphrey Bogart on location in Africa, saw the transition in Hepburn’s career from a young Hollywood actor who the studios had tried to portray as a starlet to the mature Hepburn, who was able to show film audiences the confidence and competence she had possessed all along. As one of her biographers, Sheridan Morley, explained, with the role of the missionary Rose Sayer, Hepburn transcended the “battle-of-the-sexes . . . comedies . . . and the old high-society romps” of her early career to become a great dramatic actor. This picture (for which Bogart won the Academy Award for Best Actor) was a critical and financial success for all concerned. She received Academy Award nominations for her leading roles in Summertime (1955), Rainmaker (1956), and Suddenly Last Summer (1959, adapted from a play by Tennessee Williams).

The film that brought Hepburn the greatest critical acclaim was Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), in which she gave a compelling performance of a woman sinking into the depths of drug addiction. According to many critics, this performance was the pinnacle of her career, a review that was a bit premature, since Hepburn continued to work. She won her next two Academy Awards for Best Actress for her portrayal of Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (1968) and for her portrayal of Ethel Thayer in On Golden Pond (1981). In the meantime, she continued to take leading parts on stage, for instance in The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), Euripides’ The Trojan Women (1971), and Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance (1973). Also in 1973, she appeared in a television production of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and in 1975 earned an Emmy Award for her leading role in Love Among the Ruins. Her role as a straitlaced spinster in the cowboy film Rooster Cogburn (1975), playing opposite John Wayne, was widely popular with fans, if not with critics. All these performances clearly demonstrated to the studios and critics that the American public would not only pay to see but also relish quality films starring mature, competent actors.

Hepburn continued to act in films, plays, and television adaptations until 1994, when she appeared in the films One Christmas, This Can’t Be Love, and Love Affair. In 1999 the American Film Institute placed her above all other woman actors of the last one hundred years in its Greatest American Screen Legends list. She continued an active life into her last years, riding her bicycle, gardening, and swimming in the ocean.

On June 29, 2003, at the age of ninety-six, Hepburn died in Fenwick, her house in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Memorial honors soon followed. The lights of Broadway were dimmed for an hour, and in 2004, New York City redesignated the corner of East 4th Street and 2nd Avenue as Katharine Hepburn Way. In 2006, Bryn Mawr College dedicated the Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center and inaugurated the Katharine Hepburn Medal, first awarded to actors Lauren Bacall and Blythe Danner.

Significance

Throughout her career, Hepburn pushed her own limits and those of the motion picture industry and the medium of film. Her stage work, from her struggles with The Lake to her success in The Philadelphia Story to her frequent Shakespearean roles, bear testimony to her determination not to rest on her laurels. Her four Academy Awards for Best Actress attest to her talent as an actor and to the admiration of her colleagues.

Although initially audiences did not know what to make of her early performances (which were far from Hollywood stereotypes of women), and despite more than her share of critical attacks, Hepburn would come to epitomize honesty, independence, and intelligence, and she was idolized by millions of filmgoers. Hepburn’s biographer, Gary Carey, quoted Richard Watts of the Herald Tribune as saying,

Few actresses have been so relentlessly assailed by critics, wits, columnists, magazine editors, and other professional assailers over so long a period of time, and even if you confess that some of the abuse had a certain amount of justification to it, you must admit she faced it gamely and unflinchingly and fought back with courage and gallantry.

Hepburn also would “fight back” in her films with Tracy. Indeed, she believed that in her films with Tracy, the two actors epitomized a type of American couple that appealed to the nation from the 1940’s on: Both intelligent and forceful, the woman challenging the man with her wit. The man might be the ultimate boss, but his kingdom, as Hepburn would say, “isn’t an easy kingdom for him to maintain.”

Bibliography

Andersen, Christopher. Young Kate. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Based on conversations with Hepburn, this book chronicles her parents’ lives, vividly recounts what it was like to grow up in the Hepburn family, and provides a detailed family chronology as well as a bibliography of supplementary references.

Berg, A. Scott. Kate Remembered. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003. Berg relates anecdotes and opinions that he collected during twenty years of conversations with Hepburn.

Carey, Gary. Katharine Hepburn: A Hollywood Yankee. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. After a brief discussion of her childhood and college years, this book provides a general survey of Hepburn’s career from her first theater job through her work in the early 1980’s. Includes a chronology of her films from her first in 1932 to On Golden Pond in 1981.

Considine-Meara, Eileen. At Home with Kate: Growing Up in Katharine Hepburn’s Household. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2007. Written by the daughter of Hepburn’s cook of thirty years, this memoir tells intimate inside stories about Hepburn’s life at home, complete with the recipes that she loved and numerous photographs, movie stills, and cartoons.

Hepburn, Katharine. The Making of “The African Queen”: Or, How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. This is Hepburn’s writing at its best as she recalls the making of The African Queen. Discusses her first awareness of the project through the trials of working on location in Africa, the completion of the film in the studio, and Bogart’s Academy Award.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Me: Stories of My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. This book lives up to its title, providing stories of Hepburn’s life from childhood through 1990. Written in a warm, readable, almost telegraphic style, the book discusses her career, her films and plays, and her family. Includes many photographs.

Kanin, Garson. Tracy and Hepburn. New York: Viking Press, 1971. This personal chronicle of the work and lives of Hepburn and Tracy is based on the author’s long friendship with both and tells many stories of their lives together, both privately and professionally.

Mann, William J. Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn. New York: Henry Holt & Sons, 2006. Based upon interviews with Hepburn’s family and friends, Mann traces the evolution of her career as a movie star, the various artistic and ideological influences on her, and her complicated, much misrepresented love affair with Tracy.

Morley, Sheridan. Katharine Hepburn. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. This thorough retrospective of Hepburn’s career, written by the son of one of her former colleagues, provides detailed information about the progress of Hepburn’s career and each of her pictures. A filmography provides thorough documentation (to 1984) of her films, television work, and her stage work.

1901-1940: 1934-1938: Production Code Gives Birth to Screwball Comedy.

1941-1970: March 2, 1966: Goldman’s The Lion in Winter Premieres.